Winter Traffic by Stephen Greenall

Author:Stephen Greenall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Koestler’s voice is inside her now, the delicate gift of his phrasing that she acquired from his journal. With enough care you could fake the elegant copperplate, but not the particulars of his inner working—the mechanism that was his mind. It is a timepiece whose tick and tock she would know anywhere.

She knows it now: Karen is the quiet reader, existing without detection, happy to let the man across the way chat with Angelo de Souza. The notice she takes of their lurid vehicle is only intermittent because her hands feel so full. Also her heart, chest, mind, lunchless viscera. The urge to run is powerful, to burn away the anxiety that rises in every cell. Part of her still thinks it’s a hoax, a gee-up, but a lesser part now—one that gives up more of its share with every scented page.

Slane’s flick will be finishing soon. Daniel Day Lewis will have stuck with Winona, ditched Michelle. Tough luck, Countess—should have done something different with your frigging hair.

I could save you some of that precious time. Tell you how it ends.

Corkscrew fizz. It nags at her, a tumbler that won’t quite fall. It nags despite the explosive device in her lap, a bomb that masquerades as a beautiful book. She closes it and smoothes her hand across its creamy leather face. Vanilla perfume, age of innocence. Koestler gave his masterpiece a name but she doesn’t understand what it means.

But I already know how it ends.

Karen is ready. She lifts the sun visor so that the light will strike her hair, which she unties and shakes out like a model selling conditioner. Just a tiny flourish in the landscape, a minuscule action in the story of the street. From thirty yards away, facing the wrong direction, you’d have to be an observational genius to notice.

Or just a man attuned to women, a thing she knows him to be.

The tumbler clicks; the nag evaporates.

Christopher Slane reads Edith fucking Wharton.

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